November: Cause Marketing and Small Business
The topic for November is Cause Marketing, or associating your product or service with a cause. From Yoplait donating money to breast cancer research with purchases of yogurt to a local restaurant giving 30% of the proceeds of an evening’s sales to a local school, you likely see examples of cause marketing every day.
Discussing this topic for me brings on such a sense of deja vu. Those of you that have been following Spring Insight for a while know that I first started the company as a cause marketing consultancy. While the focus of the organization has changed, the importance of cause marketing to this organization has not. Spring Insight continues to give a percent of profit from every single engagement to charity and to encourage our clients to create similar programs.
Why do I believe so strongly in cause marketing for small business? I actually have all sorts of reasons but let’s narrow this down to two.
- From a business perspective, cause marketing is just plain smart! Associating your product or service to a cause is a great way to differentiate it from that of a competitor to provide that extra little push to close a sale. Plus, when you are communicating with your customers, it gives you something interesting to talk about that is so much more than just selling.
- From a human perspective, cause marketing is a good thing to do. Let’s be blunt, we start our business to make money. As an MBA, I get that. But, when we can make money while doing something for the greater good? That is just an awesome thing!
Check the blog every Tuesday this month for more strategies on making cause marketing work for your company.
Next Tuesday, we will talk about how you can use cause marketing to create interest on your website.
The following Tuesday we will discuss how you can use cause marketing as part of your social media presence.
Finally, Tuesday the 27th we will take a look at how various retailers integrated cause marketing into their Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns.